by Michael Shea
"What I mean, Effulgent Ones," Ostrogall ventured, sounding both encouraged and worried by our silence, "is that you haven't even, well, gloated over this wealth. You haven't laughed and exulted and run your hands over it, you've neither cavorted nor capered nor crowed. You are fabulously rich, but—I grovel in apology!—you don't seem to know it! Surely you are glad of these incredible riches, gentlemen? And surely you feel now that I have truly benefitted you, enriched you beyond the shadow of a doubt? By any sane reckoning of your present abundance, and my unstinting assistance?"
Seeing his drift, I found myself to be instantly and peevishly disposed against it.
"Oh inexpressible ones," diapasoned Ostrogall, "oh my Rescuers, wise and just and mighty, oh dare I, in my utter humility, frame the word?—friends!"
"Forgive me," I snapped, "but you may not frame the word. You are a demon, part of the Quintessential Excremescence from the Cosmic Bowel. I think you presume most offensively upon the bond of obligation placed on you by our saving of your odious life!"
"Oh please, Effulgent Ones, I utterly retract the term, how could I have presumed, madness took me!—but please Effulgent ones, do not now again show a relenting of your good resolve to honor our bargain! Think not of returning me to those remorseless larval jaws. Please bethink yourselves how at every turn I have guided and enriched you!"
And indeed he had. But perversely, at that moment, our wealth seemed as much a burden as a boon—a dangerous, arduous cargo we must shepherd over many miles, through many nights in the open, with leisure and peace of mind a thing of the past, till we could make our little mountains of loot secure. And to add to the onus of it all, we must be very careful—more than careful, as a matter of fact—in using the Unguent of Flight once we had brought our treasure to the upper world. For if thieves saw us in mid-air, they would not rest until they had our courses marked—marked and, likely enough, followed to whatever destination Barnar and I might have in mind. It was one more burdensome accountability.
We paused above the tubeworm prairie; we trod the air and unlimbered our jars of Unguent. We had to reach deep to dip with careful, sparing fingertips, and freshly anoint our palms and our bootsoles. It was clear our jars would be half emptied by the time we reached the surface world. Chance thus cunningly cozened us of the extra flight we had filched, for our remainder looked to equal the two bowlfuls formally alloted us by the secondary keepers of the Talons.
"You are right, demon," I answered at last, "in noting that I am not ecstatic. And frankly, I feel no grateful warmth toward you, though your advice on some occasions has been arguably fruitful, I suppose. . . ."
"Oh please don't waver from your good resolve, gentlemen! We are so near my natural home. Those plains not one mile hence beyond these leechfields, just rightwards there a bit from your course. But set me there, I beg, and I'll take instant root! We'll be quits! I'll bless your holy names eternally, my radiant saviours!"
And indeed the plains he indicated were not far off from the field of tubeworms we still overflew. "Your language is really quite shamelessly fulsome," I reproved him, though I won't deny I felt the demon had a way with words. Sensing a pause in our resistance, Ostrogall gushed, his voice all flutes and oboes, "Oh do not extinguish me, I beg. Gentlemen! Is not my Being like a fine-wrought bowl of crystal that brims with the cosmos around me? Do I not hold life's brief drink of wonders—hold it in my senses like a chalice, as do you? What boots inquisition into our individual deeds? We share Life's brief excursion from the vasty dark. We soar a short trajectory through wheeling infinities of form, and then plunge gone again!"
Well, I will confess, he moved us. In a word, we felt for the demon. Is it not amazing, what mere prolonged association can inure us to? But in that moment Ostrogall struck a true chord; life, after all, is a short flight, a few centuries long at the utmost. Barnar and I traded a look, and found, with surprise, that we were agreed to relent.
"Very well, then," Barnar said. "Give him here, Nifft. I'll veer over and back—no need that we both waste Unguent."
"Right," I said. "Here he is."
"Oh you paragons of human beauty!" the demon-stump ululated. "Oh you Archetypes, angelically strong and wise—Aieeeee!"
Our weariness, coupled perhaps with a failure to adjust to the new lift of our freshened Unguent, caused me to falter, and fumble the transfer of Ostrogall's head; I released it before Barnar had quite securely gripped it. It plunged.
The demon squawled with rage as he plummeted down through the harpy-swarms thick as flies: "Rot and roast you, human scum!" he shrilled. "Better the grub had me! Now I'll wait three hundred years for my spores to—" Here a tubeworm flickered up, and swallowed him.
We flew on, a little bemused. "There is something poignant, isn't there, about his mishap?" I asked Barnar. "How he loved seeing things! Such a devoted witnesser. Now he'll be blind three times longer than if the grub had eaten him."
"The irony is poignant, as you say."
We swam along in a silence somehow loud with the unspoken bitterness between us. The demon's absence seemed to throw our tacit controversy into stark relief. A last recrimination burst out of me: "I would never have believed it possible that Barnar Hammer-hand might tell me he was not a thief, or that, hearing him say it, I might fail to swear he lied. But now when you tell me you are not a thief, I am shamefully compelled to nod assent, and say, `In truth, no thief is he!'"
Barnar answered nothing. Far to our left, like a winter-slain tree, the stark, branching bones of 'Omphalodon's Talons, gnawed down to stumps now, still valiantly battled the living mantle of Foragers feeding on them. I looked up briefly at 'Omphalodon's Eye. We had flown close to that Eye not long past, and glimpsed things in its gulf that I disliked to remember. Now in that bloody orb I thought I saw a glint of the demon's grief for a part of himself too briefly resurrected; he seemed to pity that ruined limb which once had burned to seize the sun.
After a time, I said, "It won't be long now," meaning the black constellation of Nest-mouths we swam toward. There was deadly-hard work ahead of us, getting our plunder back up through the Nest.
It was a nightmare of toil. High in the vaulting of the Nest's great entry chamber, we webbed one of our bales in a crevice with pitons and line. We flew up-Nest one-handed, a shared grip on the second bale between us. Shifting and veering our burden's bulk clear of sudden traffic was killing labor. Our dye blazes were half worn off the tunnel walls, eroded to nothing in places. We blundered and groped, sweat-blind, through miles of tunnel.
We reached our larval chamber, and stowed our plunder. Then we flew back down, and did it all again.
When it was done at last, we fell into our hammocks. We could go up the gangway right now if we chose, breathe the wind and see the sun again. . . . We didn't move. We were stupendously rich men, and above us lay a world of thieves. We would sleep first, and come out careful. In truth, we felt like troglodytes still, twisted and stunted to this underworld, the sun and sky alien things we knew only from tales. Through another long dark we slept safe in the earth, lullabyed by Behemoth's unsleeping maternal bustle.
XXIII
Adhesions of the hell just left,
A feeling that the will is cleft
A taste for darkness in the soul
While hideous images unscroll
Before my staring Inner Eye.
Am I still I? Did I not . . . die?
ALL WAS PREPARED. I was armed. Our fortune was assembled in the nook, and Barnar standing by it, where I would send down to him packing materials, and whence he would send up our bundled wealth when I had transport secured above.
He watched me standing before the gangway hatch, watched me still hesitating to step into the bucket. I think he understood. I gestured at our netted gems, glinting bitterly like captured beasts' eyes, their otherworldly lusters biting through Behemoth's cyanic hue, and at our bales of infernal artifacts, bulging and jutting against their shroudings like the little bundled corpses of
alien monsters. "I half feel it's real only down here in the dark," I told Barnar. "I half believe that when we raise it up there, it will vanish, evaporate into the sky."
"Be comforted, Nifft. I've seen demon gems traded in sunlight, right enough. In the Shallows' bazaars I've seen one of them buy a whole ship, with its cargo and crew!" Barnar smiled as he said this, knowing it was something deeper that was giving me pause. Knowing that what panged me now was a fear that I myself—transformed by too long and lustful a sojourn below—might evaporate into the sky, no longer a proper citizen of the sunlight.
I had—we both had—faced such a return a decade past. But that reascension from the Demon-Sea was an escape from constant battle for our lives. We had hewed and hacked and dodged our way through the subworld, and the desperate toil of it purged us of that realm's infections.
Now we were coming from a long, delirious bacchanal of plunder. From the great red furrow of ruin ploughed by a conquering army, we had gleaned obscene riches, hanging for the most part free and clear of the unspeakabilities we viewed. Here, at little personal risk, we plucked hell's fruit and savored it. In consequence, our hearts and souls were deeper-dyed with the demons' lurid gloom; half my will still swam in that dark like a hungry eel, nosing for infernal wealth.
"Well," I said, heaving a sigh, "I'll send down a warning, if the sunlight starts melting me." I stepped into the bucket, and Barnar winked at me, and slid the hatch closed. Down came the counterweight.
The clank and rattle of the climbing bucket put me in mind of a windlass weighing a heavy anchor. I fancied I was some stubborn, millenial root that could only with great mechanical force be pulled free of the earth.
And my will clung to the earth, to the dark. The smell of stone was like a home-scent to me; my heart rebelled at leaving it. I prayed it would be night above; that the stars, like distant demon eyes, might greet me with their gentler scrutiny—anything but the great fiery eye of the sun!
The sun! When I did step out into it at last, flinging back the hatchway with a desperate abandon, like one who steps off some high brink, my sick hesitations were in an instant burnt and purged away. For one heartbeat, light was pain—and then it was pure joy, was itself my heart.
I had emerged into early morning, and this first sunlight that I saw came in golden spears, piercing the rafters of the main building's vast roof.
I stepped out onto the rampway; the smell of open air overwhelmed me. A breeze, scented faintly with sun-warmed stone and skorse trees, moved through the building. Then tears of happiness sprang to my eyes. Tears of relief. I ran down the ramp, ran a beeline to the gaping bay doors nearest me, ran out and stood under the open sky again.
I climbed a half mile up the mountain side, and stood gazing for a long time at the sweep of the mountain ridges, their canyons and crevices brimming with velvety purple shadows, and their high ground all burnished with the young sun's slanting gold. Above them all the big blue bell of the sky rang its soundless peal, its reverberant azure note of boundlessness.
For a while I was wrenched out of time by the raw beauty of it all; I utterly forgot where I had just come from, and where I meant to go next. I wholly forgot that I possessed wealth to awe kings. I was filled with a floating freedom, newborn into a new world.
Faint music reached me, and I collected myself. It was a frail thread of melody, a jump-up falteringly rendered on a pennywhistle. I went back down to the compound.
Out below the balcony of Costard's office, where Anhyldia had planted a little greensward, two men at arms lounged, one man's cape spread between them with loaves and cheese on it. Two hefty fellows they were, taking their ease, their pikes and bucklers laid by. They were men of only middling talent in the trade of arms, perhaps, since they appeared wholly oblivious to my approach. Still, we could use them on the road. They would have orders to stand to their posts, but then, I reflected, these men had been hired by miserly Costard. I smiled, and eased open one of the smaller pouches of my money-belt.
"Greetings, stout fellows!" I heartily cried. They jumped; the musician nearly swallowed his pennywhistle. "The ineffable Costard," I told them with a courtly salute, "sends me to you with the first installment of your augmented salary, and with your new instructions."
They stared at me, a bright-orange savage in a brutish nomad's kilts and bandoliers, and armed to a perhaps disturbing degree. I had Ready Jack's pommel at my left shoulder and Old Biter's haft at my right, four javelin butts sprouting from the quiver aslant on the small of my back. I had besides, on my belt, a poignard, a knout-and-knuckles for close work, and a sling and a poke of lead shot. Their eyes moved toward their weapons, and abandoned the thought. They looked relieved when I placed hefty stacks of lictors in their hands. "Costard sends you with our new instructions," one of them echoed, nodding hesitantly. I could see him almost ask me if Costard was down in the mine I had obviously just stepped out of. But he felt of the weight of the gold, and nodded more decisively.
This was Klaskat, the calmer of the pair. Both he and Klopp were tonsured in the severely barbered style of the young stockyard bloods down in Dry Hole, their hair sparingly confined to the crown of the head, like a treed, short-furred cat. Klaskat allowed that Master Costard had mentioned a couple of associates still down in the mine. "But he didn't mention, or rather I'm not sure he mentioned, ah, new orders. . . ."
"Banish your doubts. This additional stipend—Oh you're quite welcome!—is to remunerate you for the travel involved. We'll be taking a wagon of heavy freight down to KairnGate Harbor. You'll be riding escort—and it's wonderful weather for journeying, don't you think? So fresh! So bright!"
"The, ah, day is fine indeed. And what shall we call you, sir?"
"Nifft, call me Nifft. And you'll call my associate Barnar, for that is his name. Our first task is to send him down some baling canvas and cinching straps. He'll be sending us back up the bundles we'll be carrying. These contain a waxy exudate we have scraped off of larval hides. Exotic pomatums and perfumes are manufactured of the stuff." They nodded knowingly at this. I resumed, "I will tell you frankly our load is worth almost a hundredweight of gold—You see how I trust you?—and this is why we want a couple of stout men-at-arms with us."
"Well, Honor Nifft, Klopp and I have been twice or thrice around the corral," Klaskat modestly smiled, by which he meant, in Dry Hole's cattle-town parlance, that they'd had some taste of doughty deeds and peril.
"I knew it when I first clapped eyes on you," I said.
XXIV
Gravely is old Dry Hole smitten:
Toppled, trampled, and beshitten.
KLASKAT AND KLOPP had many Dry Hole kin and acquaintance working for neighboring sap mines—whence, indeed, Costard had hired them. They went over to the Lucky Gasket Mine across the ridge and leased a dray team and some mounts; with their cattletown savvy they brought over nine skinnies, six for yoking to one of the Superior's freight wagons, three for mounts. These light-built plods are quick afoot, but big in the shoulders for heavy pulling.
Barnar and I knew the joys of a bath in fresh mountain water, and the intoxication of the sky and sun, which draped our bodies like royal garments whose splendor we could not get used to. Even after we'd set to loading the wagon with the bales Barnar had bucketed up from the mine, we could not stop interrupting ourselves to stop and gaze about us, wave our arms and exclaim at the glory of the morning. Klaskat and Klopp gave us an odd look or two, but proved both discreet and industrious. Though Barnar and I did all the loading, the massy bales of precious artefacts, wrought metals, gemstones, coin and bullion, were noisy in the handling; they knocked and rattled and chinked as we hefted them in place and tied them down. They sounded most unlike bales of larval skinwax. Klaskat and Klopp politely disattended, but acted a bit more impressed with their work thereafter.
By late afternoon we got rolling, Barnar at the reins, I riding point, Klasket and Klopp flanking behind. My fortune, my stupendous, fever-inducing wealth, now had wheels und
er it. Any child who could manage a team could possess it all in one opportune moment. Now I knew in full what it was to fear thieves. I felt more danger on this sunny, empty mountain highway than I had in any corner of the world of demons.
We'd hired two mediocre men-at-arms to help us guard a fortune that might buy an island chain: villages, fortresses, trading fleets and all; a fortune that—if not halved—could accomplish the wildest reachings of my imagination. The mediocrity of these hirelings of ours meant there was less to fear from them should they prove treacherous, of course, but it also meant less to hope for from their prowess if we should be attacked.
Ah to take wing with it all—what safety we'd felt in the air! But we grudged using any more of the precious Unguent for haulage—and as our combined loot's weight now exceeded the Unguent's lift, we must fly twice to the coast and back, leaving it in unguarded halves at either end of the transit. More than this, should we once be seen in flight, the report of it must fly as well. We could not thereafter come to ground with the anonymity we now enjoyed, and in this anonymity lay our best security.
The day declined. Big, black-winged krawks circled in the perfect blue, above canyons brimming with purple shadow. The sun's all-gilding, all-ennobling eye, for which great 'Omphalodon lies bound in stone, blazed gloriously, though I had scant attention for it now. Potential ambushes loomed everywhere along a highway that wound through so many ravines and defiles. I rode so tensed for action that I was slow to wonder at the highway's emptiness, but our Dry Holers were less so.